IRON MAN 3: Subtlety’s Kinda Had Its Day

Hi all, I’m not writing as many reviews these days due to time constraints, but I will try to write reviews for most of the movies I watch this summer. If you’re new here be very aware: SPOILERS ARE COMING. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. I do not hold anything back in my reviews. I talk about whatever I want, so if you haven’t seen Iron Man 3 and you don’t want to know anything about it, don’t read any further. If you’re simply unable to make decisions and are looking to a stranger on the internet for advice on whether you should see this movie or not, the answer is, Yes. One last time, spoilers lie beyond this point.

Iron Man 3 (2013) – The 7th Marvel Cinematic Universe Film – Directed Shane Black – Starring Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce, Ty Simpkins, Rebecca Hall, Jon Favreau, Stephanie Szostak, James Badge Dale, Paul Bettany, William Sadler, Miguel Ferrer, Ashley Hamilton, and Stan Lee.

“Ever since that big guy with the hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety’s kinda had its day.” – Aldrich Killian to Tony Stark

In Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel needed to win mainstream audiences over to characters they were likely only partly familiar with, and the payoff for this was THE AVENGERS, the third highest grossing movie of all time.

Creating a superhero cinematic universe on this level had never been attempted, and Marvel cleverly built one film on top of the other, using Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, and Tony Stark to connect the films. Anticipation for the post credits scene became an actual thing; it became a sign of membership in the Church of Marvel. Theaters emptied out but a few remained to get the thrill of evidence of the connection. Comic fans had spent forever waiting for the films to acknowledge that they weren’t just watching Spider-Man in New York, but Spider-Man in Marvel’s New York. The nature of film rights made this difficult for Marvel, of course, and DC and Warner Brothers had only a halfhearted interest in doing anything except printing Batman money. They tried and failed with Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s $200 million love song to Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner, and then tried and failed with Green Lantern, Martin Campbell’s $200 million gamble on the precociousness of Ryan Reynolds.

Both films were stuck in the past. Superman Returns was clearly designed as a nostalgia fest, but Lantern was the more disheartening film, and not just because Martin Campbell had previously directed Casino Royale, the best action movie since Die Hard. It’s not awful, but it’s empty and cobbled together. Both films commit one of the largest sins of cinema in the 2000s – they had no souls of their own. They lacked vision: Singer borrowed his from Donner and Campbell got his from … marketing execs? Focus groups?

Forget quality for the moment – the truth of it all, the actual, honest-to-goodness, real difference between Marvel and DC at the moment isn’t that Marvel knows what it’s doing and DC doesn’t, but that Marvel and Disney want to make superhero movies and DC and Warner Brothers doesn’t.

Be real – if DC/WB had wanted a Wonder Woman movie to get made, it would have gotten made. There were rumors, there were people hired to write scripts, but … nothing. Remember when Vin Diesel was going to play the Flash? When David Goyer was going to do a Green Arrow prison movie? When Halle Berry was going to play Catwoman?

What happened to these movies? (Go with me on that last one.)

Chris Nolan’s Batman movies are excellent and it seems that DC/WB thought that was enough. (Watchmen is a DC movie but it’s not about the DC Universe.) The first and third movie in the Dark Knight trilogy aren’t so much Batman movies, anyway, but Bruce Wayne movies. As good as the films are, there’s a hint of “putting on a costume really is a silly thing to do.” Across town, Marvel has no access to Spider-Man or the X-Men, but they’re pushing on, getting a loan from Merrill Lynch to take control of the movies that get made with their characters. DC is commissioning scripts from everyone but barely committing to anything, and Marvel is tossing Iron Man and Hulk and Thor and Captain America onto the screen in solo movies and people are going to see them.

Seriously. All of a sudden, people not only know who Iron Man is, he’s the coolest superhero on the block. Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. created the blueprint for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and everything built to the phenomenon that was THE AVENGERS.

So … where does one go from there? Does one regress to the past or push on to new stories?

Sequels have tended to operate on the bigger is better model: more villains, more action, more of everything. I was very curious about how IRON MAN 3 would work – was it going to be a sequel to IRON MAN 2 or AVENGERS? Were we going to get a video call to Steve Rogers? Lunch with Thor? A double date with Bruce and Betty? Was there going to be a nice easter egg on a screen somewhere about Thanos? When you’ve gone and made the third highest grossing movie of all time by filling the sandbox with all of your toys, how do you take the next step? How do you outdo what you’ve already done?

Short answer: you don’t even try.

IRON MAN 3 beautifully blends both the IRON MAN films and AVENGERS. There’s no Cap, no Thor, no Fury, no Coulson … only Banner (Mark Ruffalo) shows up for this go-round and they save him for the post-credits scene. Marvel clearly set out to make a film which refocused on the individual characters. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is haunted from his experiences in AVENGERS which has made it hard to go back to his old life. Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is running Stark Industries now and she’s committed to Tony’s “no weapons” decree. When Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) shows up, having lost his old Igor appearance for a GQ look and pitching a new, admittedly impressive piece of tech, Pepper turns him down because it’s a tech that’s too easily weaponized.

There’s a nice mix of personal growth between Stark Industries’ three main actors: Pepper has never been better, Tony has never been worse, and Happy has never been better and worse at the same time. The expanded roles for Pepper and Happy (Jon Favreau) at the start of the film feel right. Deep in the film, when Tony has been captured by Killian, the antagonist tells the protagonist, “Ever since that big guy with the hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety’s kinda had its day,” but amidst all of the explosions and Iron Man suits, IRON MAN 3′s central argument is that subtlety has definitely not had it’s day.

Shane Black’s film will not be as influential as Favreau’s first IRON MAN, but there are some very nice, very subtle examples here that other films in Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe would do well to emulate, and the key to that is seen in how Tony, Pepper, and Happy are used. Black deftly balances the decline of the first with the rise of the latter two. In this film, Pepper still loves Tony but she doesn’t need Tony. She’s more important to the company than he is, and while he’s still giving her large stuffed animals for Christmas, tinkering with new suits of armor, and reliving New York, she’s running a company.

In the previous MCU movies, Tony Stark goes to his lab because that’s where he wants to be, but now he’s in the lab as an escape. He’s hyper aware of his public image, of course, so he’s not Howard Hughesing it, but he’s definitely a man in crisis, a man exhibiting post traumatic stress disorder over the Chitauri attack. It’s important that Killian references Thor in his “subtlety’s kinda had it’s day” speech and not the Hulk because it’s Thor and the Chitauri that Tony focuses on as the reason for his problems. He understands science, but gods and aliens don’t fit into that model. Be clear, though, that Thor and the Chitauri are what he focuses on, but his problems go deeper.

When Happy’s expanded role gets him put into a coma by agents of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), Stark tells the press that he’s going to go after the terrorist. “This isn’t about nations,” he insists. “It’s personal.” It’s a powerful moment but it’s not exactly Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. Tony’s words feel empty and he looks tired. He’s lashing out, desperately searching for a new project to focus on. In a great scene between Tony and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) at a restaurant, Tony practically begs to be let in on the Mandarin issue but Rhodey shuts him down. Contrast that to earlier films where Tony actively resisted working for the government. Now, it’s he who wants them and not the other way around. This exchange is a small part of a longer talk that ends with Tony suffering an anxiety attack when two kids ask for his autograph and present him with a crayon drawing of Iron Man. Tony writes the girl’s name on the drawing but then writes, “Help me” after it as his attack hits.

Subtlety has had it’s day? Not quite. Stark, and the film itself, forwards all the explosions and drama and snark, but look past that and here’s a guy who doesn’t have it figured out anymore. Who’s scared. Who’s unsure of his place in the world. It used to be fun when he was down in that lab, making fun of Dummy and trading barbs with Jarvis (Paul Bettany) and having his new invention not quite work out, but here it’s a bit sad, almost desperate. The billionaire playboy genius philanthropist has stopped being a visionary. Instead, he’s looking for comfort. Instead of building something new, he’s endlessly tinkering with his last invention. Pepper thinks he’s on Iron Man suit Mark 15, when Tony’s actually on Mark 42. The visionary is circling. When Tony looks at his armor now, it’s like he knows he’s created his masterpiece and all that’s left is to refine it instead of leaving the refinement for others and moving on to the next Big Idea.

In most of these sequels, when a character does the same thing he always does, it plays as tired because we’ve been there and seen it, but the subtle smarts of IRON MAN 3 is that it knows you want to see this scene even if it knows you’ll probably end up feeling that it’s just an echo of better scenes from days gone by, so it gives you the scene and makes it a purposeful echo and uses it to not celebrate Tony Stark, but to show how he’s as much stuck in the past as the audience. We’re watching IRON MAN and AVENGERS over and over again on Blu-ray and he’s watching them over and over again inside his mind. We’re all stuck together on the shelf.

So what do you do? Where do you go when you haven’t gone anywhere?

Critically, it’s only after his desperate plea to the Mandarin to come get him results in the Mandarin’s goons coming and getting him, blowing up his California mansion, that Tony gets moving forward again. Tony falls into the ocean and the armor gets him out of it and while Pepper ends up driving away with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a scientist/ex-one night stand of Tony’s, Jarvis delivers Tony to Tennessee. He crashes in the snow and his armor shuts down and he has to drag the heavy suit someplace warm. He breaks into a garage and gets to work, and it’s here, in this small garage, where Tony’s life gets going again. His work is interrupted by Harley (Ty Simpkins), a kid sidekick who manages to make the film better instead of worse by challenging Tony. The two of them cut deals and help each other and give each other crap. I like that Tony actually seems most comfortable in this film with someone who he doesn’t know. Part of being a visionary, one imagines, is a restless spirit. Tony has always treated life like it’s his playground, but over the last six MCU movies, he’s increasingly had to play the grown up.

What has that brought him? He already had fame and fortune, but it gave his life a purpose, it delivered him his One True Love, it put him in position to save the entire freaking world. It’s taken away his restlessness and replaced it with stagnation.

But thanks to the Mandarin, all of that is taken away from him and he has to build himself up again, and from that moment on, you get the sense that as awful as the things are that are going on, Tony’s actually happier now that he has a new problem to solve.

And about that problem …

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has largely stayed true to the comics. Oh, the details have been altered a whole bunch but there has yet to be a really large disconnect between the films and the comics.

Which brings us to the Mandarin.

In IRON MAN 3, Iron Man’s most classic foe has been turned into a fraud. The Mandarin is presented as a terrorist mastermind, blowing people up and teaching the United States lessons in the process. Kingsley’s approach to the character is to speak in long, slow, monologues punctuated by threats and promises of additional violence. He’s got Aldrich Killian’s Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) think tank helping him broadcast his message of hate out to the world.

Except he’s a phony. Without the benefit of his armor, Stark plays James Bond, breaking into the Mandarin’s mansion in Miami and discovering that the Mandarin is just an out of work British actor-slash-junkie holed up doing drugs, drinking beer, and fornicating with some whores. It’s bound to be controversial, of course, as Marvel has sacrificed one of its greatest villains on the altar of comedic distraction.

For me, though, I thought it worked beautifully. Maybe IRON MAN 3 didn’t need to do something to send shockwaves through fandom the way Nick Fury showing up in a post credits scene, but what this says to me is that Marvel has made a conscious decision to remind its fans that they’re not making films simply to translate the comics into celluloid. Phase One was about establishing the heroes and building up to AVENGERS. Phase 2 apparently isn’t interested in playing things safe. Marvel doesn’t want to sit on the shelf. It wants to push forward. The risk is that it comes across as disrespectful, but the number of people who are going to be so upset by this and not come back for future MCU movies is bound to be negligible.

And here’s the thing – this might ultimately make the Mandarin and even badder-ass villain than how he appears in the first half of IM3. There’s a couple things to keep in mind here. One, this could all be a ruse. Trevor Slattery (the name of the actor playing the Mandarin) might be nothing more than a backdoor escape the Mandarin created in case he needed him. One of his ten rings of power, after all, allows him to increase his psionic energy. The film presents Aldrich as the mastermind but there’s no reason Marvel couldn’t reveal in the next movie that the Mandarin used one of his rings to make Aldrich think he’s the mastermind.

Two, Aldrich claims at one point that he’s the Mandarin since he created the terrorist to help manipulate the global war on terror. There’s no reason Pearce couldn’t come back as the Mandarin in the next movie, either. Those dragon tattoos on his body could be more than just ornamental.

Three, Slattery claims that he’s completely unaware of any of the violence being perpetuated in the Mandarin’s name. He thinks he’s just playing a role, but even with all the drugs and booze and whores, that seems an illogical stretch of the truth. Does he really not think he’s talking to the President? Was his assassination on live television of a Roxxon Oil Exec all an act? Is he completely unaware that there’s no violence being committed out there? In the film, Stark and Rhodey need information from him that he’s willing to provide, so they overlook any inconsistencies in his story in exchange for stopping Killian.

Black forgoes a personal confrontation between Stark and the Mandarin for his climax, instead orchestrating a CGI orgy of multiple Iron Man suits versus Extremis soldiers. It’s effective without being excellent.

IRON MAN 3 is a very good movie. There’s no way it was going to top AVENGERS but as the duty first fell to Robert Downey Jr. to launch the MCU, it falls to him again to relaunch it. He is, once again, very good: funny, smart, fast-talking but now with self doubt added to the mix. I hate seeing him blow up all of his suits of armor, but I love that he goes back to his destroyed mansion to rescue Dummy from the wreckage without the film milking it for cheap emotion.

Subtlety’s day isn’t over, yet.

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Atomic Reactions: Marvel Comics on Film now available.

When he’s not talking to other writers, Mark Bousquet is doing some writing himself. He is the author of multiple novels and collections, including the recently released The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

DAREDEVIL: How Do You Kill A Man Without Fear?

Daredevil (2003; Director’s Cut) – Directed by Mark Steven Johnson – Starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jon Favreau, Joe Pantoliano, David Keith, Leland Orser, Erick Avari, Ellen Pompeo, Derrick O’Connor, Jude Ciccolella, Kevin Smith, Frank Miller, and Stan Lee.

If you haven’t seen the Director’s Cut of DAREDEVIL, then you haven’t seen DAREDEVIL, because the Director’s Cut is thisclose to being included among the best of all the Marvel movies.

When the theatrical release hit theaters back in 2003, I went and watched it, and kinda liked it. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t think it was bad, and I didn’t think many of the arrows people were slinging at the film were fair: the costume, the water coffin, the fact that Michael Clarke Duncan is black. I never thought the costume was a major drawback, I thought the water coffin was actually a decent idea, and I’m much more interested in actors getting the spirit of a character than I am concerned with nailing the look.

There were other problems with the theatrical cut, however, as the emphasis on the Elektra (Jennifer Garner) subplot turned DAREDEVIL into a more traditional superhero movie and robbed the film of what made Daredevil unique. I don’t think alteration of source material is, in and of itself, a bad thing, and Daredevil has, at various stages in his comic book life, been portrayed in a more traditionally superheroic sense, so it’s not the portrayal itself that bothers me, but that in doing so, it put DAREDEVIL in the company of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2, and in comparison to those films, Mark Steven Johnson’s theatrical take on the Man Without Fear fell short.

The Director’s Cut, however, offers a darker, more serious, more unique superhero story, and is much better for it. We’ve become so accustomed to movie studios slapping “Director’s Cut” on DVDs and Blu-rays where the movie isn’t noticeably different than the theatrical cut that we’ve almost become inoculated to the idea that the Director’s Cut could be something significantly different, and DAREDEVIL’s Director’s Cut is a definite and significant improvement. Because the film had a lukewarm reception on its release, the film has slipped through the cracks a bit, and the release of the Director’s Cut hasn’t fully impacted the cultural perception of this movie, and as a result I am pretty comfortable in saying that the Director’s Cut of DAREDEVIL currently stands as the most under-appreciated superhero movie ever made.

I love DAREDEVIL, and the reasons why it falls just short of the very best superhero movies is the execution of the idea in several spots, and not the idea, itself.

How could DAREDEVIL has been just that little bit better? Ben Affleck could be who he is now, as an actor, instead of who he was then. Colin Farrell could have toned down Bullseye’s kewl and been more the driven killer that he is in the second half of the movie. Mark Steven Johnson could have had his movie shot with a little more grit and a little less slick. And Jennifer Garner …

I am not a totally unkind person, and if doing this movie is where Affleck and Garner fell in love … well, if the trade off for love is a bad performance, then that is a small price to pay. But it doesn’t alter my belief that Garner’s performance here is simply not very good, and the de-emphasis of her character in the longer Director’s Cut helps to make DAREDEVIL a better film.

DAREDEVIL opens in the present, with a busted up Daredevil clinging to the cross on top of a church. He lowers himself in and the cathedral’s priest (Derrick O’Connor) offers him some comfort before we drop into an extended flashback that gives us Matt Murdock’s origin as a child. As anyone who’s been reading these reviews knows, I’m not overly fond of origin stories, yet the presentation here is exceedingly well done. What helps is that the story of young Matt (Scott Terra) is a self-contained story about a boy, his dad, and a fateful decision by the father to buck the mob. David Keith is excellent as Jack Murdock, a down on his luck fighter that’s been working for the mob as an enforcer. When Matt catches him roughing someone up, he runs away and gets blinded by radioactive chemicals. Father and son make a bond with each other to start attacking life, and this thread ends with Jack refusing to throw a fight, which gets him killed.

It’s a concisely told, effectively rendered short story at the beginning of the film, and it does an excellent job setting not only the violent tone for what follows, but also demonstrates there’s a real consequence to people’s actions.

Cut to the near present where the bulk of the film takes place. We don’t return to the moment in the church that we left and the film doesn’t end on that moment, either. Now, that’s not a huge break in chronology, but it helps to give DAREDEVIL a little something extra in the presentation of the narrative.

The primary difference between the Director’s Cut and the theatrical cut is the inclusion of a subplot that features Coolio and Jude Ciccolella. While it doesn’t dramatically alter the film because of how it enhances the scenes that made the theatrical cut, it adds to the overall tone of the film by having an honest-to-goodness legal subplot. No longer is Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson bit players in Daredevil’s film, but they’re actual characters in the larger story. It’s important to see the Matt persona at work, as it increases the tension between what he does as a member of the Court and what he does as a vigilante. With all of these extra legal scenes put into the narrative, we get a much greater sense of Matt’s frustrations with the legal system.

There’s a fantastic scene between Matt and Officer McKensie where Matt loses it. He uses his increased sense of hearing to help determine if people are lying by listening to their heartbeat, and he’s frustrated at how both his client (Coolio) and the main witness against him (Ciccolella) are telling different versions of the same story, yet both appear to be telling the truth. Matt goes after McKensie, but as Matt and not Daredevil. The officer is obviously confused about being roughed up by the blind attorney, but after Matt bangs up his car and rips open McKensie’s shirt, he sees a scar that tells him the cop has a pacemaker, and thus his heartbeat wouldn’t be affected by lying.

It’s good stuff and it shows the failing of a superpower, something that’s not often done unless it’s a total breakdown in powers. This isn’t that; instead, Matt’s powers are in full effect, but they fail him because he’s become over-reliant on them. It’s a small touch but it adds a nice sense of pathos to the film without taking control of the narrative.

At a coffee shop one morning, Matt and Foggy (Jon Favreau) are having their morning jolt, arguing about the alleged veracity of Daredevil and giant alligators in the sewers of New York. There’s great chemistry between Favreau and Affleck, and one of the film’s better touches is how Foggy will try to lie and trick Matt by using Matt’s blindness against him, suck as when he tricks Matt into dumping mustard into his coffee. The trick is on Foggy, of course, as Matt is fully aware of what his friend is trying to pull, and when the opportunity presents itself in the arrival of Elektra Natchios (Garner), Matt switches their cups so Foggy gets the mustard blend.

Matt decides to try his hand at flirting with Elektra, who’s not having any of it. Matt pursues her down the street, where they engage in some painful banter and then do a much more effective form of banter when they start punching and kicking each other over a kid’s playground. On the whole, the scene doesn’t work for me, but what does work is that it’s nice to see that Matt has a life outside of being Daredevil. And yeah, he’s not good at personal relationships, but there’s a genuine spark of life when he goes after Elektra. He’s not doing this as cover, but because he likes chasing after a pretty lady.

Good for him, and good for including that in this film. Mark Steven Johnson doesn’t appear to have any delusions of grandeur here, nor any shame in directing a superhero movie; he’s just trying to tell the very best Daredevil story he can tell.

Matt’s life is interrupted when the Kingpin (Duncan) hires Irish assassin Bullseye (Farrell) to kill Elektra’s dad, who wants out of the criminal business. Bullseye kills Elektra’s dad with Daredevil’s billy club/walking stick/grappling hook, which gets Elektra to think that Daredevil is to blame. With her father dead, Elektra does what every daughter would do in this situation: she goes home, puts on some tight leather, sets up some sandbags, arms herself with a pair of sais, cuts open the sandbags as she’s twirling and kicking around the room, and then goes after Daredevil.

DD, of course, doesn’t want to fight her, but that doesn’t stop Elektra from jamming a sai through his left shoulder, which causes Daredevil to do one of those slow slides down the wall. Matt decides now is the time to pull off his mask (because doing it before would have been silly), and Elektra instantly realizes that Daredevil couldn’t possibly be responsible because … because they made out? … and then Bullseye shows up and kills her. We get a really nice scene of Daredevil and Elektra crawling towards each other as the police move up through the building, and it’s one of the few scenes between them that really works.

The action sequences in the film are solid without being exceptional, though I really like how the film depicts Matt’s radar sense (though I would have gone with a dark red echo effect instead of blue to better fit the film’s color scheme). I do like how Johnson takes advantage of his locations – there’s a fight on the rooftops and another inside a church – but he’s not very adept at showing people punching and kicking each other. The film uses some special effects to make the three principals jump higher and stuff and it looks really silly. Daredevil, Elektra, and Bullseye don’t need to be able to jump to a rooftop no one else can get to in order to be awesome. They’re already/always awesome.

Matt defeats Bullseye in the church fight and then goes after the Kingpin. Duncan is really good as the Kingpin; maybe it’s not the pure Wilson Fisk we’ve seen in the comics, but I love that he’s standing over this film, casting a huge shadow before entering the film as a real physical force in the final act. His dismissive line to his assistant that, “I was raised in the Bronx. This is something you wouldn’t understand,” as he readies himself for Daredevil’s arrival tells us more about the character than all the posturing ever could, just as Matt’s conflict over his Catholicism tells us he feels guilty about his actions as Daredevil much more effectively than him weakly telling a scared kid that, “I’m not the bad guy” ever could.

I really love the Director’s Cut of DAREDEVIL. While just short of that ultimate tier of Marvel films, this is an exceptionally good movie. It’s still a little too slick and the acting isn’t what it needs to be, but this darker DAREDEVIL is an under-appreciated and important superhero movie.

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK: I’m Sure It’s a Fine Bandage. May I Sit?

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) – Directed by Bill Bixby – Starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Rex Smith, John Rhys-Davies, Nancy Everhard, Joseph Mascolo, Michael O’Hare, and Stan Lee.

David Banner (Bill Bixby) is a smart guy, but it is not his smartest moment to take the ticking time bomb that is the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) into a city.

Banner (calling himself Belson this time around) is working outside of a city doing physical labor but after being roughed up by a fellow worker, he decides it’s time to move on, and the big city nearby is the place he decides to go to stay hidden. Crammed cities are almost as good a place to hide as isolated locales, but when you’ve got the Hulk buried inside of you, and all it takes to pop him out is a bit of uncontrolled rage … maybe the desert is a better place to lose oneself than the city.

Banner’s less-than-brilliant decision makes for some good TV, though.

Unlike THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS, which focused a bit too much on the appearance of Blake and Thor, TRIAL does a much better job integrating Daredevil (Rex Smith) and the Kingpin (John Rhys-Davies) into the mix this time around. Part of what makes this integration better is the approach the story takes with the non-titular characters. In RETURNS, it was Blake and Thor bursting into Banner’s story and too much of the focus was on the interlopers; TRIAL operates antithetical to that, with Banner entering a city where an ongoing story is already taking place. Since he’s our in, it feels more natural to stick with him, and then when we go off to spend time with either Matt Murdock, Daredevil, or the Kingpin, it feels like we’re getting a fuller part of Banner’s story instead of getting a competing story.

Rex Smith is pretty good as Matt Murdock. The movie does feel the need to keep reminding us, “He’s blind!” but Smith manages to get some good moments out of it. When he stops by the hospital to interview a woman who was attacked on the subway and is now blaming David (he was there, didn’t want to get involved, then did, and Hulked out) thanks to pressure from the mob, she asks him if he can see her bandage. She realizes that he can’t see the bandage, of course, and starts to apologize.

“I’m sure it’s a fine bandage,” he says easily and quickly. “May I sit down?”

Smith is less impressive as Daredevil. It’s not that he looks bad (that’s the ugly black suits fault), but the cheeseball lines he has to spout at times is right out of the How to Be a Lame Superhero Handbook.

Continuing the one really positive aspect of RETURNS, the best part of TRIAL focuses on the relationship between the human halves of our resident superheroes. When David and Matt are on screen together, TRIAL works as serious human drama. The scene between the two at Matt’s apartment where he tells David his origin story in order to get him to help carries with it the weight the two men feel at having such dangerous secrets. David doesn’t fully relent, or share his own secret, but he is moved by Matt’s story. David is particularly drawn in when he learns that Matt’s blindness was caused by radiation.

After this chat, Matt gets a tip that the woman that the Kingpin (they never actually call him the Kingpin, just Wilson Fisk) is holding is being kept an an abandoned movie studio, and Matt goes off to rescue her. David eventually follows and stands helplessly outside as Fisk’s men do a number on Daredevil, so he goes all green rage monster, busts the door down, and rescues the fallen vigilante. After carrying him away, a barely conscious Murdock gets his fell on all over the Hulk’s face and holds it as he transforms back into Banner, thus ceding his secret to the lawyer.

John Rhys-Davies is very good as Wilson Fisk, though the production makes some odd choices for him, such as keeping him in really large, dark sunglasses, and filming him from sharp angles that are supposed to make him look cool, I guess, but really just make him look like the poster boy for late ’80s kewl. Rhys-Davies’ deep voice and commanding presence counters all that gimmickry, creating an effective bad guy to play off both the Hulk and Daredevil.

I really like how TRIAL puts the Hulk in tight spaces. In showing the Hulk inside a subway car, a courthouse, and then a prison, the sense of the Hulk’s power comes across far more effectively than it does jumping off a building or crushing steel. Even if the movie doesn’t even show a second of the Hulk breaking out of Banner’s cell or busting through the far wall, the first scene in the subway car sets an appropriately physical tone.

If TRIAL was intended as a back-door pilot, it is a bit of a shame that we didn’t get a regular Daredevil TV show out of the deal. The set-up between Murdock, his fellow attorney (not Foggy Nelson), and his male secretary, plus the addition of Wilson Fisk overseeing the city’s crime factions, could have turned out okay, even if the late ’80s were probably not the best time for a superhero show to find a network audience. I don’t think it would have set the world on fire, but I’m guessing it would have been more successful than Street Hawk.

Come on, you didn’t really think I was going to go this entire reaction without mentioning Rex Smith’s 13-episode series about a physically disabled guy who fights crime on a fancy motorcycle, did you? It kind of makes you wonder – when they were casting TRIAL, did someone say, “Look, if we’re going to have a physically handicapped man dress in black and fight crime, we HAVE to get Rex Smith?” Or did Smith have to audition like everyone else, with all the other actors in the waiting room eyeing him with hate for his experiential advantage?

Bill Bixby does his best to put Daredevil over, and it would have been a fitting legacy to everything Bixby did in terms of making good, quality superhero television if these last three INCREDIBLE HULK movies had launched a few additional series, but really, the depiction of neither Thor nor Daredevil is as striking as that of the Hulk.

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK is notable for being the first Marvel movie of any kind to feature Stan Lee, who plays a juror at David’s trial. That’s not why you should watch the film, but it’s nice to see Stan make an appearance. (Also, if you’re a Babylon 5 fan, Michael O’Hare has a small role as a mobster thug.) TRIAL is a marked improvement from RETURNS; where RETURNS is a movie I watch simply for the chance to see a live-action version of Thor, TRIAL is actually worth watching for the story. It’s a good effort and a decent TV movie, thanks mostly to the work of Bixby, Ferrigno, Smith, and Rhys-Davies.